https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day

Britten’s setting of the Holy Sonnets of Donne

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXHuVGKJNWc

Donald Trump is hardly the first President to lie to the American people. Nor is he the first to place ideology before data. But this White House, unlike any other, has already crossed the threshold into a space where facts appear to mean nothing.

Eventually, the President’s daily policy outrages, his caustic insults, and his childish Twitter rants will fade into history. But it will take years to gauge the impact of having a habitual liar as President. When words like “science” and “progress” become unmoored from their meaning, the effects are incalculable. And let’s not kid ourselves: those words today are under assault with a ferocity we have not seen for hundreds of years.

The United States is now a country with dozens of unofficial government “resistance” Twitter accounts. There is one for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, another for the Environmental Protection Agency, and others for the National Park Service, the Peace Corps, and the Customs Agency. Last week, in what the account describes as an effort to present “actual facts, instead of alternative facts,’’ they were joined by the nation’s most important public-health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There are horrific lies of omission: last week, the White House released a statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day that pointedly declined to refer to Jews, because others were killed, too. And there are denials of truth that are impossible to categorize: the President met with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an anti-vaccine zealot with a history of falsehoods, and talked to him about possibly forming a commission on vaccine safety. (After Kennedy said he’d actually been asked to lead such a commission, provoking dismay, the Trump team said that no decision had yet been made.) Then there are lies so ludicrous that it is hard (though essential) to take them seriously: according to Trump, the United States has just gone through the most devastating instance of voter fraud in the nation’s history. And, in his telling, every one of the millions of illegal votes happened to be cast for Clinton

http://www.succeedsocially.com/meetpeople

Someone I know is now a widow and has no friends

Don’t Worry, Be Unhappy

“In social situations, gentle negativity seems sincere to me. And it can require courage. “If you can’t say something nice, say nothing at all” we are taught.  So being negative risks, at the very least,  social censure. Of course, nobody needs a stream of unsolicited, unvarnished truths–everything in moderation. But many times, negativity is either effective or, at the very least, an honest expression of a different take on the world. No harm done.

Actually, in a weird way, being negative also implies movement, progress, to me. If everything is good, nothing needs to change, and then where are we? Settling for good enough, lacking goals, gettin’ fat on the couch.”

http://learn.lexiconic.net/elementsofpoetry.htm

STANZAS: Stanzas are a series of lines grouped together and separated by an empty line from other stanzas. They are the equivalent of a paragraph in an essay. One way to identify a stanza is to count the number of lines. Thus:

• couplet (2 lines)
• tercet (3 lines)
• quatrain (4 lines)
• cinquain (5 lines)
• sestet (6 lines) (sometimes it’s called a sexain)
• septet (7 lines)
• octave (8 lines)
  

FORM: A poem may or may not have a specific number of lines, rhyme scheme and/or metrical pattern, but it can still be labeled according to its form or style. Here are the three most common types of poems according to form:

1. Lyric Poetry: It is any poem with one speaker (not necessarily the poet) who expresses strong thoughts and feelings. Most poems, especially modern ones, are lyric poems.

2. Narrative Poem: It is a poem that tells a story; its structure resembles the plot line of a story [i.e. the introduction of conflict and characters, rising action, climax and the denouement].

3. Descriptive Poem: It is a poem that describes the world that surrounds the speaker. It uses elaborate imagery and adjectives. While emotional, it is more “outward-focused” than lyric poetry, which is more personal and introspective.

 

In a sense, almost all poems, whether they have consistent patterns of sound and/or structure, or are free verse, are in one of the three categories above. Or, of course, they may be a combination of 2 or 3 of the above styles! Here are some more types of poems that are subtypes of the three styles above:

Ode: It is usually a lyric poem of moderate length, with a serious subject, an elevated style, and an elaborate stanza pattern.

Elegy: It is a lyric poem that mourns the dead. [It’s not to be confused with a eulogy.]It has no set metric or stanzaic pattern, but it usually begins by reminiscing about the dead person, then laments the reason for the death, and then resolves the grief by concluding that death leads to immortality. It often uses “apostrophe” (calling out to the dead person) as a literary technique. It can have a fairly formal style, and sound similar to an ode.

Sonnet: It is a lyric poem consisting of 14 lines and, in the English version, is usually written in iambic pentameter. There are two basic kinds of sonnets: the Italian (or Petrarchan) sonnet and the Shakespearean (or Elizabethan/English) sonnet. The Italian/Petrarchan sonnet is named after Petrarch, an Italian Renaissance poet. The Petrarchan sonnet consists of an octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines). The Shakespearean sonnet consists of three quatrains (four lines each) and a concluding couplet (two lines). The Petrarchan sonnet tends to divide the thought into two parts (argument and conclusion); the Shakespearean, into four (the final couplet is the summary).

Ballad: It is a narrative poem that has a musical rhythm and can be sung. A ballad is usually organized into quatrains or cinquains, has a simple rhythm structure, and tells the tales of ordinary people.

Epic: It is a long narrative poem in elevated style recounting the deeds of a legendary or historical hero.    

A boy shepherd in Syria from the Guardian website photos of the week

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/serious-art-thats-funny-humor-poetry

“Carolyn Forché, someone who has never been accused of being a funny poet, has said “irony, paradox, surrealism . . . might well be both the answer and a restatement of [Theodor] Adorno’s often quoted and difficult contention that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” But what did the philosopher and critic Adorno mean by this fatuous statement? No poetry? Or just a very, very serious and earnest poetry? Because, let’s face it–earnestness is almost always bad art. Good art makes us think; it has more questions than answers. Often, but not always, satire does this too. But earnestness almost never does this–that’s not its job. Earnestness is comforting. It wants to hug us. And we want to be hugged sometimes. But sometimes we want to laugh while poking holes in self-righteousness and oppression, whether it be literal political oppression or oppression of a quieter sort – cultural and aesthetic oppression. Irony and satire are such a good antidote to oppression because oppression needs to be earnest (or at least look earnest) in order to be feared by those it seeks to cow. Oppression cannot work alongside irony because it believes in its own righteousness and a monolithic concept of truth that must be asserted to the oppressed with a straight face. Irony and satire are the tools by which the oppressed get to make fun of the oppressors without the oppressors getting it.”

http://www.openculture.com/

“Put simply, democracies run on one set of values (civility, tolerance, etc.), and fascist states run on another (violence, appeal to social frustration, etc). And we start to encounter real problems when democracies sacrifice their ideals and start trafficking in the violence that belongs to fascists. This idea gets crystallized by Sheri Berman, a poli sci professor at Columbia, when she writes at Vox:

[F]ascists embraced violence as a means and an end. Fascism was revolutionary: It aimed not to reform but to destroy the modern world — and for this, a constant and probably violent struggle would be necessary. Violence was not merely the method through which revolution would be accomplished; it was valuable in and of itself, providing supporters with powerful ‘bonding’ experiences and ‘cleansing’ the nation of its weaknesses and decadence.

Vox then adds to this thought: If we condemn Nazis for “their use of politically motivated violence and then turn around and punch someone in the face because he’s a Nazi — and bond over it online through memes and jokes — [it] seems hypocritical.” And it damages democracy.”

https://youtu.be/utC_qVQtjZI

• My lover broke a wine bottle
  I put him on the bed and took out his splinters withtweezers.
  I stitched him up completely…he’ll be fine in a few weeks time when the cuts are all healed.
  Meanwhile he’s resting in the cat’s basket.And the cat is in bed with me.
  Well,I thought he was a cat at first…turns out to be my ex… he still had a door key.
  He said,what’s going on?There’s a man in a casket.
  I said,No, he’s in a basket
  So he said,how big is your cat.
  I showed him a photo.
  That’s no cat it’s a cheetah,he informed me.
  Just like you,I said naughtily
  So he took the fence and ran away to sea…I hope it floats.
  He ought to join the navy but he wore bottle green.
  Why are bottles green,I wonder?
  And I like blue glass though not in shards.
  So now the cat sleeps in a cot with its kittens… and feeds them all on demand and me as well.
  That’s a saving grace

  nymore